By Santiago Castillo |Staff Writer|
Governor Jerry Brown plans to allocate $244 million to CSU and UC institutions.
Earlier this month, Brown proposed his state budget funding, which included giving $10 billion to education.
When asked how this funding could affect CSUSB, Associate Vice President of Finance, Monir Ahmed said, “If the budget is approved as proposed by the governor, the campus hopes to increase enrollment, add additional sections to existing courses, while keeping the fee flat.”
Ahmed added, “We have a huge amount of infrastructure deficit, we need maintenance for some buildings that are quite old including this one [Sierra Hall] that needs to be renovated, taken down and rebuilt.”
If funding is received, CSUSB may put those funds to build renovations or new buildings explains Ahmed.
When asked what should be the priority of our school if we were to receive more funding, student Samuel Vallejo said, “I think the money should be put to work in areas needed by students, for example some struggle with their Math and English classes so I feel that an after school tutoring program to aid students one-on-one with their teacher would be helpful.”
Vallejo explains that another way to use that money is to get students involved in our campus. For example, we could have activities where students meet another, anything to get students going and excited about going to school should help them with their education.
Student’s thoughts on what the funding should go to are primarily based on tutoring, more convenient office hours, getting students more involved and more funding to every department.
“More funding should be added to the Biology department because I think it isn’t getting as much funding as needed, and maybe the art department is getting more funding (not saying it’s of less importance), but we should also focus on other departments as well,” said Jose Hernandez, student.
”I feel we should have more tutoring programs, students can find tutoring if they look for it, but it really isn’t advertised, tutoring should be the main focus as well as having new buildings,” said Edgar Ortiz, student.
Brown’s proposal is to help out education, but communications consultant of the California Teacher Association, Bill Guy, reminds us that a proposal is just that, and not an outright act.
“The legislature will weigh in with their own funding proposals and then negotiations between the governor and the legislature will result in a final state budget, probably sometime in June or July. So the actual new dollars coming to education will not be finalized until that time,” said Guy.
Brown’s proposal shows that it will be helpful, but will not take effect until June or July when our governor and legislature come to an agreement.
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